


The Things I See Before Me

by crazylittleelf



Category: Fringe
Genre: Alternate Universe, Community: au_bingo, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-20
Updated: 2010-07-20
Packaged: 2017-10-10 16:50:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 498
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/101943
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crazylittleelf/pseuds/crazylittleelf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alt!Astrid character study.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Things I See Before Me

**Author's Note:**

> For AU_bingo prompt "cyberpunk."

_Anyone could look._

Agent Astrid Farnsworth was a Looker.  She saw the Cloud.__

There were other Agents like her, with unfocused gazes, seeing a torrent of information superimposed on that which was called reality.  There were others like her who sifted though data, looked at probabilities and packaged the results into manageable output, into Yes or No, Live or Die.  The Agents who were not like her believed that the Agents who were like her did this without emotion.  They were wrong.

She settled at the console, and the skin of her hands tingled at the contact, little shocks and pulses that danced between the cold conductive-glass and her palms, her wrists.  The glass warmed to the temperature of her skin, quickening the flow of information, focusing it.  The Agents who were not like her believed that this was when she established her connection to the Cloud, but they were wrong about that, too.  She was always connected to the Cloud.__

_It was seeing that was important._

She did not remember ever not being connected to the Cloud.  She wasn't sure if she had just been too young to remember, or if those memories had been redacted.  She wasn't sure it mattered.  She'd long ago stopped wondering what might have been.  Her place was in the Cloud and nowhere else.

The others didn't understand, the Agents who weren't like her.  She heard when they whispered about her, barely bothering to lower their voices that hovered somewhere between curiosity and revulsion.  She heard them.  They didn't bother her.  They couldn't understand.__

_She was not alone here._

The Alpha-cloud was her home, was assignment, was her.  It was data, pure and limitless, waiting to be controlled.  Through the threads of the Alpha-cloud, other Lookers launched inquiries and analysis, questions unending in their asking, answers unimaginable coughed up by the hive-database, the living network.  She was part of that network, or rather the network was part of her, her very neurons an extension of the Cloud.

Only Lookers called it the Alpha-cloud, and only in rare conversations to each other.  To everyone else it was _the_ Cloud, because there was only supposed to be one.

_There were other clouds._

Sometimes she saw things that she did not report.  All Lookers did.

They saw the Pattern.  They saw the way people tried to manipulate events to further their own agendas and shape the direction of the world.

They saw the thready life-force of the quarantine-dead, lingering in trapped bodies, trapped minds.  They knew the quarantine didn't kill all of its victims.  They knew that they people responsible for the quarantines knew this, too.

They saw the Mirror.  They saw it's cloud, chaotic and untapped, information without form, without Lookers of it's own.  They _named_ the Mirror, and while they weren't alone in their knowledge of it, they alone understood that it wasn't the only one.

They saw that they weren't the only ones looking, watching.  Observing._  
_

_The cloud-verse swarmed before her eyes._


End file.
